New Mystery: Floppy seen in Control Panel but can't boot to it...

OK, here is something I haven't seen in these parts. I need to upgrade to bios on an 18 month old Gateway. According to Intel this requires booting up to a system floppy and running the upgrade from that disk. And it can't be a WinXP formatted floppy. Only problem is that this system will not boot up to any floppy, and can't read any floppy (get the hourglass of death). When I look at the floppy drive and the controllor in Control Panel, says all is fine. Yes, I already swapped out the floppy dive ande cable for other ones. And yes, other PCs will boot to the system disk I am trying to use, so the disk is ok. Am I missing somehting really stupid here...? BIOS/CMOS on the Gateway is set to look for the floppy drive (A) first, then C, then some intel thing, then CDRom. Is there anything else in a BIOS that would disable the floppy on the motherboard? Light on the drive is not on steady, just when it is accessed. And I can boot up to regular system hard drives when I want to to. Great mystery to me...
thanks,
Waring Abbott

If the bios is set properly it seems your controller is defective as you tired other drive and cables. If you have or know someone who has a burner, just make an iso boot CD from the floppy image and run your flash from the cd as it boots to an A: prompt. I am surprised that Intel does not show an Express BIOS install which it has for most of its products. What is your mobo model name (eg., 845eg, ca810e, etc) maybe I can find you an express flash.

well here is some questens i have for you dose your floppy have a light always on ??? if it dose the cable is on wrong
and have you tryed a new floppy disk drive there is some support for zip drives in some bios this might be a problem to
well you can install the new bios but created a boot cdrom from the bootdisk with!!!! the bios and the bios software on the disk this work good
i would also run a virus scan on the computer a long time ago i work for hours on a computer that had anticmos vrius i thought the bios was bad but
it was the virus changing the setting and accessing the floppy all the time
good luck

If all your bios settings are correct, it could be that your floppy IDE port on your mobo has died. Check to make sure no prongs are bent, and use compressed air to rid yourself of any dust. If none of these work, try flashing from a CD, as said above. If that doesnt work, try to get your hands on a zip drive and try from that. Good Luck.

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